“Whether the right eCommerce solution to run profitable business is chosen?” is a regular question among store owners. The decision should be based on your initial targets, budget, and products you want to enter eCommerce industry with. To partially relieve merchants of this selection burden, we prepared a research of recent changes in distribution of shopping carts market share taking builtwith.com and similartech.com platform’s usage stats for 2017 as well as Cart2Cart migration trends for 2016 as a ground.

Why does the market share distribution matter? Because it often works like an indicator of how much the platform development strategy works well or not. If the product gets better – people react and the user base increases. If not – quite the opposite happens: the user base decreases, so as platform’s market share.

So, as you, probably, already guessed we are going to make predictions uncover statistical data about these particular platforms.

Below you can find the chart made according to builtwith.com usage statistics and compare most popular eCommerce platforms market share.

This data greatly correlates with target solutions that users choose for data import via Cart2Cart. Though, even including the fact that WooCommerce has the highest migration percentage, the number of its import dont extremely differ from other popular platforms.

Here is another chart showing leading eCommerce platforms market share on the web, presented by similartech.com.

Interesting fact is that according to similartech.com, second most popular platform in the entire internet is Magento, and OpenCart is even not listed. No changes regarding WooCommerce – this solution is a complete leader in eCommerce platform market share that keeps positions far ahead its competitors.

Let’s take a closer look on world’s most popular shopping carts.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is considered to be world’s most widely used solution. According to builtwith stats it owns the biggest eCommerce platforms market share – 2,118,313 active web sites launched with this robust WP plugin. As stated on official plugin website – WooCommerce powers 28% of e-stores over the world.

Let’s talk about some migration trends researched by Cart2Cart migration service. That’s you chance to put a nose to internal stats.

Migrations to WooCommerce has grown 14 times since 2012. Its number surpassed Magento import that decreased 3 times during these 5 years. Looks like super-flexible and difficult to manage “Industry standard” has stepped aside and lost points in favor of both highly-optimized and user-friendly solution, suitable to any-size business.

It would be wrong to think that WooCommerce is a direct Magento competitor though. Platforms can peacefully coexist as they serve different businesses with different aims.

According to similartech research, WooCommerce is mostly used in Business and Industry category. Magento in its turn is applied to Shopping Category.

It’s worth mentioning that WooCommerce might be so popular thanks to its absolute ease of customization. In addition, this plugin has a great advantage over e.g Shopify when it comes to design possibilities. Apart from native WooCommerce themes you can apply any of WordPress ones available on the web. Believe me, there are tons of them. Though even WooCommerce leads in quantity, Magento for example remains a perfect choice for big-sized businesses.

OpenCart

Second one among eCommerce dominators 2017 is Opencart. According to builtwith statistics it powers 311,444 live stores.

Though, considering migration data from Cart2Cart, we should mention that popularity of import to this robust solution has dropped down 3 time, comparing to year 2013. And contrary – openCart exports has grown noticeably (almost 10 times for 6 years).

According to buitwith.com data, OpenCart was losing its positions is distribution of shopping carts market share for the last year. But, to my modest opinion, the release of long-awaited OpenCart 3.0 is going to be a game changer. OpenCart is slightly but confidently trying to make a phenomenal “comeback”. Check the chart below.

Not sure what was the reason of such a huge OpenCart drop down in distribution of shopping carts market share. One of my personal suggestions could be OpenCart core-extension model which requires numbers of plugins to operate store with advanced functionality. Another my theory is that decrease of positions in distribution of shopping cart market share is connected with OpenCart themes installation (all of them require basic skills of HTML, Java and CSS). Frankly speaking, it’s more difficult than picking up a template in WooCommerce or Shopify.

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted solution, what differs it a lot from all eCommerce dominators 2017 (they all have open-source nature). But, we can’t deny that fact that Shopify popularity is growing the fastest. This platform offers top-notch functionality and advanced features along with ease of use. It is a strong competitor in distribution of shopping carts market share even to freeware software.

According to buitwith, there are currently 310,323 live websites using Shopify. Looks like it can overplay OpenCart in distribution of shopping carts market share in future.

Considering Cart2Cart migration stats, we can say that during the last year Shopify import was even more popular than WooCommerce in some quarters. This is a result of effective marketing strategy and promotional occasions they regularly arrange. Huge sums of money is spent on ads and PR. And this platform can really boast of exceptional ease of use and list of numerous partnerships (Pinterest, Facebook, Amazon, eBay etc.)

On the next chart we can observe how rapidly has grown Shopify usage numbers. 1,3 % of Top Million world website are based on Shopify.

Magento

Another platform among eCommerce dominators is well-known Magento. According to builtwith it has 243,816 of live websites over the world. This robust solution never step aside in distribution of shopping carts market share. It constantly introduces new progressive features and give store owners extensive possibilities to boost store performance.

The release of Magento 2 has become a new page in its history and eCommerce industry in general. Magento 2 is growing user base continuously. Now the platform provides store owners with intuitive and user-friendly Admin Panel.

Magento 2 offers impressive functionality what proves one more time the top-flexibility of this platform. As stated on official website “Magento is named a B2B leader” nowadays. This solution facilitates daily inventory management for business clients, allowing them to create schedule of deliveries and track inventory in multiple warehouse locations as well as to negotiate pricing terms. It is the best fit to enterprise stores.

Take a look at migration trends statistics, presented by buitwith.com. The chart below shows from which shopping carts users most frequently migrated to Magento since 2011.

You might notice that the greatest part of the listed platforms is open-source. One of obvious reasons could be that store owners want to get Magento’s high flexibility, exclusive features and almost unlimited customization options.

Interesting fact: according to Cart2Cart internal data users prefer more upgrading Magento to new version over changing it to another solution. This is another proof that Magento is still in deal and is not going to give away its part in distribution of shopping carts market share.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop closes the list of eCommerce dominators 2017. According to builtwith it serves as a platform to 227,387 active websites. The total amount of data migration to PrestaShop has increased almost twice, comparing to 2011 (Cart2Cart stats). The highest percentage of switching to this platform was noticed in 2015.

PrestaShop remains popular thanks to intuitive dashboard, exclusive Forecasting and Intelligent Merchant KPI features as well as integrations with world giants (eBay, Amazon and others).

The breakdown below show that the same as with Magento, most often store owners of other open-source shopping carts are switching to PrestaShop.

What will change in distribution of market share?

Ecommerce industry is the rapidly changing environment. Some of recent migration trends researches state that open-source platforms are gradually giving their positions in distribution of market share to hosted solutions. Of course, the eCommerce dominants in 2017 are mostly open-sourced, though users lately prefer hosted shopping carts more (because of user- friendliness).

The fact is that all of listed shopping carts are about to grow, as they are market leaders with high-tech technology. Apparently, in the nearest future there will be no new revolutionary platforms able to take away the market share from “Top 5”.

According to Cart2Cart migration statistics, these shopping carts are targets of about 80% of all migrations.

Probably, the fastest augment of user base will be on Shopify and WooCommerce. These solutions allow to build-up advanced stores from scratch quickly and easily.

Magento has almost no alternative in maintaining large enterprises’ stores. So it will not only keeps its positions, but strengthen them. Its community is supposed to grow thanks to spectacular new features offered by 2.x and the recent release of Magento Cloud. We just can’t deny that this platform is the absolute leader in adopting the newest technologies and providing the most robust functionality.

Talking about OpenCart and PrestaShop, we stay cautiously optimistic. Despite the fact they are among market leaders, they are not going to meet significant grow of market share in a short while. For instance, last PrestaShop 1.7 update was taken critically by community, OpenCart in its turn implements no crucial changes for a long time. Though, maybe the release of 3 version OpenCart will strengthen its positions in eCommerce industry. To keep leader positions, these platforms need to introduce something really stunning to users.

Final Word

What we can see from these research, without making prediction, in fact eCommerce dominators in 2017 are open-sourced platforms. But, it’s important to remind you that store owners want to get “all in one”, that means both user-friendliness and effective eCommerce tools.

About The Author

Victoria Desyatnyuk - working as Marketing Manager and Copywriter at Cart2Cart, leading shopping cart migration service that can perform automatic Magento upgrade or Magento import from 80 eCommerce solutions. Master in International Business. In love with Marketing. ECommerce enthusiast.